TorrentFreak mentions that P2P researchers are concerned about how the BitTorrent community will fare if The Pirate Bay goes down. TPB’s founders are standing trial in Sweden starting next week and if the popular tracker goes down, the cascading effect could bring down many other trackers as well.

“If The Pirate Bay goes down the load will automatically shift to others. This is because most of the Pirate Bay swarms also include other trackers. When Pirate Bay goes down it would overload others until they fall also. Meaning even more stress and further casualties. This is likely to end in a BitTorrent meltdown.”